The show presents an ongoing practice that explores a bodily response to social spaces. Investigated via drawing and painting; it considers how paint can articulate the nuance of these experiences. The works were initially conceived on a small scale, with the intention of finding a particular language that examines the notion of a bodily deficit. Reevaluated on a large scale, these condensed renderings are an attempt to discover a more direct form. In certain cases the paint surface takes on the function of a notebook, the jotted down action is inherent to the work.

John Busher (b. Wexford, 1976) graduated from NCAD with an MA Art in the Contemporary World in 2015, a Post Grad in 2008, and an Honours Degree in 1999. Recent joint exhibitions include ‘Transferrals’, Pallas Projects, Dublin (2015). Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Floorplan’, NAG Gallery, Dublin (2015). Selected group shows include ‘Impressions Biennnial’, CCAM, GMIT, Galway (2017), And Creatures Dream... A New Language..., Wexford County Council & Wexford Arts Centre, Wexford (2017), 'Halftone', The Library Project, Dublin (2016), Winter Open’, RUA RED, Dublin, and ‘Essays for the House of Memory’, Ormston House, Limerick (2014). He was the recipient of the ‘The Living Art Project’ residency in 2015 & 2017 (Wexford County Council & The Arts Council).

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios is delighted to present Prime, the first solo exhibition in Ireland of the artist Camille Norment. Her work is often site-specific, sculptural with a sonic installation. What is deeply arresting with Norment’s work is her preoccupation with how sound affects the body and how it has the ability to allow one to loose oneself through the act of listening. Sound and listening are unseen, intangible and yet the vibrations can be felt as a bodily sensation, the experiential nature of the work is of prime importance. There is a universality to tone, pitch and repetition which is quite primal. Her research crosses disciplines, exploring the interconnections between sound, myth, taboo and science within the framework of art and history. At TBG+S, Norment addresses the windows in the space as a means to play with the audience – being on display, whilst being an active listener and spectator. The ambient noise from the street collides with the voices in the installation adding to the potency of the piece.

Visitors will enter the gallery filled with the sound of deep, resonant voices that form a pre-lingual polyphonic composition contemplating experience in the contemporary state of the world. The texture of the voices is akin to a humming, a meditation, a moan, or a chant. Sitting on one of a series of benches, the voices’ vibrations are felt directly through the body - it is as though they are physically communicating with you, drawing you into their sonic and psychic sphere, evoking something primal, visceral, bodily and universal.

This kind of vocalization has been replicated in various cultures around the world from the practice of ‘moaning’ from African American church, to Tibetan monk throat singing, to OM mantra mediation, and beyond. In Ireland and Scotland it would relate to the practice of keening which was vocal lament for the dead. The sound could at once gesture to catharsis, a painful groan, a comforting meditation, or a kind of exalting orgasm. While drawing the body into the physical experience of the sound, Prime creates a constellation of cultural references that speak to a connectedness of sound, voice and the body’s experience.

Camille Norment is an American artist who lives and works in Oslo, Norway. She has exhibited and performed extensively in cultural events and institutions, including MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), New York (2013); The Kitchen, New York (2013); Transformer Station (The Cleveland Museum of Art), Cleveland, OH, USA (2013) and The Museum of Contemporary Art (The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design), Oslo (2012). In 2015, she represented Norway at the Venice Biennale.

The title of Brendan Earley’s solo exhibition refers to one place and to many. It marks the retreat into the wilderness; from childhood memories to eighteenth century rural landscapes of Wicklow by James Arthur O’Connor; from 1970s folk groups to long walks along the river Dargle, as well as the films of John Boorman made in Ardmore Studios. Working across sculpture, print and drawings, Earley’s work conjures another place and another time.

As Earley states “…it starts with the walk out here to the hinterland where my studio is and then I begin. I find the world increasingly not making sense so here in the studio I manufacture sense.” (1) A new series of drawings based loosely on the seminal psychedelic folk rock group Dr. Strangely Strange harks back to a bucolic time often associated with the Romantic landscape tradition. Similar sentiments are echoed in a large silkscreen print of another Irish folk group with its roots in Wicklow, The Woods Band, married with material most often found in tents as well as tie-dye silk prints, de rigueur at the time. This blending of past passion, present moments, and possible futures, becomes a form in which we can become enraptured. As Brian Dillon has written, “Earley’s sculpture’s and drawings constitute an intervention into apparently familiar territory that is at once oblique and immersive.” (2)

The hinterland. A place of refuge or a place to make a new place….this is the 'back of beyond'.

As part of the exhibition, works have been installed in the Geography Department’s Freeman Library located on the ground floor of the Museum Building on campus. Visitors are invited to explore the Library during its opening hours. With special thanks to Trinity College’s Geography Department and especially Gillian Marron, Librarian.

This exhibition has been supported by Wicklow County Council.

The opening of the exhibition has been kindly sponsored by O'Hara's Irish Craft Beer.

Parallel Talks, Events and Film Screenings

To coincide with these solo exhibitions there is a programme of talks, readings, events and film screenings developed in collaboration with the artists.

Brendan Earley lives and works in Wicklow. Recent solo exhibitions include; mother’s tankstation, Dublin (2017); mother’s tankstation, Dublin (2014), 'In The Midnight City', Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing (2013); and 'A Place Between', Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2012). His work has been included in group exhibitions in galleries such as Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork (2016); 'Gatherings', Fergus McCaffrey Gallery, New York (2015); TULCA Festival of Visual Art, Galway (2014); and 'All Humans Do', White Box, New York (2012). His work is in numerous private and public collections. He is represented by mother’s tankstation.

Isabel Nolan began a recent lecture with the title, “Just because the universe is probably real it doesn’t mean it is not weird or puzzling to be here.” (1) The second part was announced as, “I am powerfully confused.” These utterances indicate the expansive, yet profoundly impractical, ambition of her enquiry and her work. Setting the scene for this solo exhibition, Nolan described her problematic attraction to certain seductive and powerful cultural forms. From eighteenth century museums to sculpted Greco-Roman warriors and Gothic Cathedrals, Nolan attends to their grandeur and authority in a way that is at once fascinated, resentful and inappropriate. The resulting works are both intimate with and alienated from the spaces and objects that inspire them.

Comprising suspended and floor-based sculptures, portrait paintings, drawings, photographs and a rug, these new works unsettle simple certainties such as up and down, high and low. Nolan inhabits and collapses those hierarchies that order experience and expectation. Fallen chandelier-like forms, which cast fabric instead of light; carved pieces of ‘dust’, drawings and photographs of sculpted and living feet, beautiful floors and dirty pavements, are inhabited by an unlikely cast of figures: Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), disgraced theologian and cosmological theorist; philosopher and activist Simone Weil (1909-1943), artist Paul Thek (1933-1988) and the malevolent figure of fictional mobster Tony Soprano (1959-2007). Only the latter believes that the world is as it seems to be, “You are born to this shit, you are what you are’. The others, in their singular ways, negotiated with existence. Their diverse ideas sought to reframe reality and upset aspects of the status quo, as arguably, they attempted to find a way for humans to love the universe.

Circles feature throughout the show, from the centrally placed, suspended steel sculpture, ‘Tomb (for an angel’s wing)', to the ersatz ‘chandeliers’, or many of the hand-sized, sculpted shapes of What kind of dust is it?, to the pinched finger and thumb of the wholly absorbed thorn-puller, the 'Spinario'. These works invite us to look down into them. Feet also recur throughout, also drawing our gaze low. The delicate toes of the aforementioned thorn–puller to the great rounded toes of King Francis the 1st as depicted on his tomb to the feet of museum visitors. As Nolan writes, “Feet insist that we are of the earth; they can only very briefly escape the surface of the world. In works of art toes generally point up, soles are exposed, only when someone is dying, dead or fast asleep.”

The metaphoric intertwining of death and feet with lowness; the desire to overcome both mortality and animality with grandeur; and an enduring preoccupation with defying gravity connects these disparate works. Nolan is continually drawn to moments of coherence that contain intimations of their collapse or demise. Her work unhinges the pain, intangibility, irreverence, and joy, of human existence. 'Calling on Gravity’ continues her material exploration of metaphor, and how we bring the world into meaning.

Parallel Talks, Events and Film Screenings

To coincide with these solo exhibitions there is a programme of talks, readings, events and film screenings developed in collaboration with the artists, including a conversation between Isabel Nolan and writer Martin Herbert on 6 September 2017.

The opening of this exhibition is kindly sponsored by O'Hara's Irish Craft Beer.

The IMMA Collection has secured an important long-term loan of 50 works by Lucian Freud (1922-2011), regarded as one of the world’s greatest realist painters. The works, on loan from private collections, will be presented in a dedicated Freud Centre in IMMA’s Garden Galleries for five years and will be titled IMMA Collection: Freud Project, 2016 – 2021. With this extraordinary resource IMMA will create a centre for Freud research with a special programme of exhibitions, education partnerships, symposia and research that will maximise this important opportunity for Irish school children, third level students, artists and audiences all over Ireland and beyond.

Lucian Freud is considered one of the greatest figurative painters of the 20th-century. He is renowned for his portrayal of the human form, working only from life, and is best known for his portraits and nudes. Freud’s studio life was intensely private and he mainly worked with those he was close to. The IMMA Collection: Freud Project features a selection of the artist’s finest paintings, as well as numerous etchings. Among those represented are members of his family: his children, grandchildren, his mother Lucie and intimate friends as well as works that reflect his interest in animals and nature. Ranging across six decades, the works on loan will focus on several of the artist’s key areas of interest, including paintings of the same person at different ages, self-portraits, and double portraits.

The project will look at Freud’s role and legacy, not only in contemporary art and the history of figuration but also within specific themes around portraiture, self-portraiture, aging, still life, the psychology of space. The project will also explore his connections with Irish art developments from the early 1950s in particular, as a teacher at the Slade School, and as part of the Soho artistic milieu along with Francis Bacon, that drew Irish artists and writers including Patrick Swift, Edward McGuire, Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin and many others. Freud made several working visits to Dublin, where he found the rawness of the city of that time stimulating.

This is an incredible opportunity for Dublin. The IMMA Collection: Freud Project, placed alongside the Francis Bacon’s Studio at Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane, will uniquely present two of the 20th-century’s greatest figurative painters in the same city for a five year duration.

About the artist

Lucian Freud, grandson of the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, was born in 1922 in Berlin and emigrated with his family to the UK at the age of 11. He studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and the Cedric Morris’s East Anglican School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham. His first solo exhibition, at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944, featured the now celebrated painting The Painter’s Room, 1944. Since then Freud became one of the best-known and most highly-regarded British artists of recent times. He was awarded the Companion of Honour and the Order of Merit.

Freud painted notable figures including Elizabeth II, Lord Rothschild, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, Kate Moss and fellow artists Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and David Hockney. Freud was the subject of numerous museum retrospectives and exhibitions including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, MOMA New York; the Museo Correr, Venice, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Tate Britain; the Scottish National Art Gallery and at IMMA in 2007. A major retrospective took place at the National Portrait Gallery, London in 2012, a year after the artist’s passing.